Bearing Her Secret: Mary Elizabeth Braddon'sAurora Floyd

Abstract

Were the sketch made from a man's point of view, its openness would at least be less repulsive. The peculiarity of it in England is, that it is oftenest made from the woman's side-that it is women who describe these sensuous raptures-that this intense appreciation of flesh and blood, this eagerness of physical sensation, is represented as the natural sentiment of English girls.-Margaret Oliphant HE SUBGENRE OF THE SENSATION NOVEL FREQUENTLY USES AS A PLOT device the revelation of dreadful secrets, secrets that underwrite Victorian domestic ideology. One such secret is that Victorian domestic ideology is founded on the abjection 1 of the female body by both men and women. This is the secret that Mary Elizabeth Braddon's novels reveal. The male characters of Aurora Floyd and Lady Audley's Secret, Talbot Bulstrode and Robert Audley, reflect domestic ideology by constructing the female characters, Aurora and Lady Audley, as mysteriously dreadful powers of horror. This phantasy, already provided by the Symbolic, allows them to establish their masculine identity by mastering the female characters' secrets. Aurora Floyd dismantles the femme fatale myth of women as powers of horror, by examining the male characters' reactions to Aurora. The fact that this dark heroine, suspected because she has dark hair and eyes, turns out to be innocent, suggests that the male characters in this novel create the myth that women possess dreadful, hidden secrets in order to secure their identity by positing Aurora as being a mysterious terror of power they can then detect. The secret they discover is that the dark